Older blog entries for lkcl (starting at number 58)

this kinda excitin bein in midl of discushns, glad 2 c advgato takin off. [rsi bad 2day]

hm. found a bug-let in mod-mod_virgule where user-aliases in groups greatly confuse the heck out of the trust-metric calculations. it had the name of the previous user in the directory [!]

winbind is working! it's incredible: put a linux box in an NT Trusted Domain environment, and log in and *who cares* :)

the only thing missing, now, is someone prepared to set up some mini interpreter between NT home directories and smbfs mount-points.

finally found a site to test-drive mod_virgule.

no, i don't walk by people lying in the street.
if someone is slumped in a chair at a night club, i check that they are ok [i.e. breathing, if unconscious].
i stand by on the other side of the street, watching the stupid idiot shout at the traffic warden for five minutes because she gave his illegally parked car a ticket, getting ready when she takes her glasses off because she [of sixty years of age] thinks that, in her experience, his threatening manner may turn to violence. [at the time, i had hoped that he _would_ hit her, because it would give me an opportunity to jump on his head, repeatedly].
i say "hi" to people at King's Cross Station (London), and the speed with which their heads snap-centre and eyes-down amuses me, greatly [whilst in glasgi' (Scotland), people say "hi" to me 'n me bros' and we are all over 6ft with big grins on our faces].
i empathise with other people to the extent that i have to get the XXXX away from the world for sometimes days or weeks at a time.
i do not watch t.v., it catches my attention in a luring, insistent manner, and then disturbs me greatly [i heard that there is a physiological basis for this], especially adverts, at which i swear and shout and switch the bloody thing off, which irritates other people who may actually have been watching it.
i tolerate fools because they teach me a lot: usually that i am the fool.
i do not tolerate greedy or arrogant people, they tend to be self-centred and leave a lot of damage in their wake. as long as they do not cross my path, however, they can do what they like: it is not my concern.

"it wasn't easy sir, but we bagged 'im".
"ok... ok... any time, officer... *click*."

well, i am reminded of this, from "The 5th Element", where immediately following this telephone conversation, the Police, having picked up the *wrong* guy from the "tip-off", which was supposed to finger our hero as a uranium smuggler, get whacked by the big-uglies.

an attempt to throw someone off-track, by lying to the police, but the police get the wrong guy, get killed, the wrong guy is then mistaken as the *right* guy by the big-uglies, who then attempt to impersonate the *wrong* guy in an attempt to get on the plane. ARGH!

why do i bother mentioning this? because i split staff and documenters into certification tables, ones with the reverse-syntax. i *thought* i could simplify the reverse-syntax at a single point in the code, and ended up adding reverse-switches to absolutely everything to do with certifications and metric-calculations.

i get the impression that, at some point, this is going to bite me...

p.s. does anyone remember the name of the big uglies? one of them, their leader, is called aakgh-knot.

i _really_ wish i had access to a site to demonstrate and get feedback on the mods to mod_virgule. moo. :(

i am glad to see someone using the word man in an appropriate manner. anyone who wishes to create a different definition for this word, in this context, is doing exactly that: creating a different definition.

these people are bringing about the problem of "political correctness shit", by creating such alternative, out-of-context definitions for previously correct usage of words. maybe this is ok, maybe it isn't -- in this case.

regardless, i still don't get it how people can actually say that the use "it is" can be defined as a relative pronoun because "that's english language for you, you know, it changes with common usage", well they can fuck off, and stay out of my way.

i remain, yours, ever unimpressed, by the usage of "I T apostrophe S" as a relative pronoun,
luke.

afterthought macmillan technical publishing. i went through quite a few people on the book DCE/RPC over SMB. they sent me the final draft, asking me to review it in 24 hours. i had requested that they send me the completed chapters as-and-when, months beforehand, instead of in one shot. they did not: they sent me the whole lot, pretty much last minute. based on a review of their modifications to the introduction (four pages which took ten minutes), i estimated that it would take five days to complete the review.

the modifications includes a global-search-replace of the word "as" to "because"; "whilst" to "while"; "etc." to "and so on" and sometimes "and so forth"; all occurrences of the word "they" to "he or she" and even, once, "one", which i was really irritated by ["one can do this", "one can do that" automatically implies an arrogance on the part of the author]: i specifically and completely avoided the use of "he, she, and I" except one occurrence of "I"; all colons to semi-colons [this i was absolutely furious about: they quoted me some shit about the chicago dictionary being their standard, which none of them i doubt actually read].

on average, there were 25 modifications per page. on average, i rejected 9 of these modifications, per page. i let nothing slip by without comment. in other words, these people, who were *supposed* to have superior grammatical and syntactical understanding than the authors they were supporting [i.e. they needed _something_ to keep them occupied, so they chose to make gratuitous modifications to reflect the "usage of the english language, as it is today"], fucked it up.

my favourite one was, "this was a difficult function to decode" to "this is a difficult function to decode", making me the authority on imposing on peoples' psychology as to whether they can decode NDR data over-the-wire back to its IDL definition for the function, instead of the actual meaning, which was, "i had a difficult time decoding this function, i hope you can do better as i probably have this one wrong".

about the only thing that they got right was picking up on some of the ambiguities from my prevalent usage of the word "this". apparently, this causes problems as it is not often clear what the subject is. well, you learn something new.

well, i stuffed things up in mod_virgule, for a bit. i moved staff membership to a certification. and then discovered that this requires a reversal of the certification syntax. ehh?

"fred" certifies "lkcl" as "Master".
"fred" certfies "Project X" as "Lead Developer".

ehh??

what is the subject, and what is the object, of the second sentence? it should be like this:

"fred" certfies himself as "Lead Developer" for "Project X".

anyone spot the difference? it's that the certification is done the other way round: you certify yourself as the subject, making the issuer the project. normally: you, the certifier, are the issuer of the certificate on the subject.

argh.

it boils down to keywords: "in", "for", "of" are all reverse-subject-syntax, whilst "by" and "to" are normal-syntax. odd, huh? i'd write an article about it, but i don't want any more navel-contemplation than is strictly necessary :)

nice to see lilo back.